WEBINAR:On-Demand

(Portland, Oregon) -- In this morning's first keynote of the
Ubuntu Live conference here, Canonical Ltd. founder Mark
Shuttleworth announced the next Long Term Support release of
Ubuntu.

According to Shuttleworth, addressing a crowd of approximately
300 developers and vendors, the next LTS release for the popular
Linux distribution will be Ubuntu 8.04, scheduled for release in
April 2008.

The LTS versions of Ubuntu differ from the regular six-month
releases in that they carry a longer term of support than the
standard releases, a feature that makes Ubuntu more attractive to
enterprise customers.

The first LTS release was Ubuntu 6.06. Shuttleworth said that it
is the company's hope to continue releasing the LTS versions
"approximately every two years." If the next LTS release happens on
schedule, it will follow this goal. (The 6.06 release was two
months late to prepare it for LTS status). This regular two-year
cycle should help establish Ubuntu as more of an enterprise
play.

Shuttleworth also repeated his call for other open source and
free software projects to move to a regular cycle of releases,
similar to Ubuntu and the GNOME Project. Shuttleworth made this
call initially at the recent Linux Kernel Summit, citing that
regular predictable cycles will make open software applications
more palatable to customers and outside software vendors.

The theme of the talk was a bit of a "state of the nation,"
citing where Ubuntu is now and where Canonical sees it going, both
as a commercial vendor and as a even more open developer
platform.

Of course, the Canonical chief held some things close to his
vest. During the question and answer period following his talk,
Shuttleworth was asked about the other PC vendor partnerships like
the one Canonical currently has with Dell, which is now releasing
pre-loaded Ubuntu machines in the US. As he has done in the past,
he indicated that Canonical was working on further deals, but
declined to give out more specifics.